Salome’s Dance

This is one of over 230 illuminations depicting episodes from the Old and New Testaments. The illuminations are assembled in a manuscript known as the Holkham Bible Picture Book, and were probably made for a wealthy patron in fourteenth-century England.

The illumination shows Herod’s birthday celebrations at a richly laden banquet table, with the king and his wife Herodias feasting among a group of courtiers in fashionable fourteenth-century dress.

To the left of the table, Herodias’s young daughter performs her dance for Herod. As in the Scriptures, she remains nameless in the short text accompanying the image. She is depicted balancing on her hands, arching her back, and throwing her feet backwards into mid-air as if to perform a somersault. Such acrobatic entertainment would have been familiar to a medieval audience from the performances of jugglers, acrobats, and dancers at real-life festivities.

Dance had an ambivalent status in medieval Europe. While the Christian church conceived of the harmonious movements of angels and righteous souls in Paradise as an expression of mystical joy in the presence of God, dance on earth—especially when demonstrating exaggeration of movement—was often interpreted as a sign of a socially and morally reprehensible character, as a sign of an unstable soul, and even as a sign of madness. Medieval artists therefore often depicted Herodias’s daughter performing the elaborate contortions of a juggler to convey the ambiguity of her dance and character—both thought to have contributed to John the Baptist’s death.

In the Holkham Bible, the girl’s ambiguous role is further enhanced by juxtaposing the moment of her dance with the moment she receives Herodias’s instruction to ask for John the Baptist’s head as her reward. Using the narrative device of simultaneity, the painter shows the girl kneeling in front of the banquet table, where she obediently receives her mother’s orders, and is thus transformed into a murderous weapon.

References

Baert, Barbara. 2013–14. ‘“The Daughter Came in and Danced’: Revisiting Salome’s Dance in Medieval and Early Modern Iconology’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen s.n.: 152–92

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane and Susan Emanuel. 2017. ‘Salome’s Dance’, Clio: Women, Gender, History, 46: 186–97

The Roman–Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus was the first to give a name to Herodias’s daughter. In his Antiquities of the Jews, written in the year 93 or 94 CE, he introduces the girl as Salome—a name which over the following centuries would be attached to many different, often contradictory, but always imagined personae.

Hans Horions, a rather elusive seventeenth-century artist who worked in the Dutch city of Utrecht, painted his Salome in an austere Calvinist climate. The Dutch Reformed Church at the time fiercely opposed dancing. For instance, in a ‘Sermon against Dancing’ (Predicatie tegen ‘t dansen), published in 1643, the story of Salome and Herod is used to illustrate the fatal effects of dance. Its author, Joannes Naeranus, argues that it was the young woman’s seductive dance that led the king to commit an act of evil against his own free will.

In Horions’s painting, Herod and his birthday party appear to be spellbound by Salome’s performance. They gaze at her transfixed, ready to give her whatever she will ask for. Herodias, bathed in the same bright cool light as her daughter, is visually cast as Salome’s counterpart at the right of the painting. Her eyes seem to follow the dancer’s every move, like those of a puppet master directing her marionette’s strings, the large gleaming platter on the buffet behind her heralding the consequence of her actions: a killing. 

The dancer herself, depicted in line with earlier Renaissance tradition as an idealized beauty and artistic muse, advances her sandal-clad foot, her high slit dress exposing a bare leg. This Salome is engaged in an active act of looking of her own. She gazes out of the painting, directly addressing the spectator, turning him or her into a witness, or perhaps even an accomplice.

References
Brooks, Lynn Matluck. 1988. ‘Court, Church, and Province: Dancing in the Netherlands, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Dance Research Journal, 20: 19–27

As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, artistic interest in the figure of Salome reached new heights. An unusually large number of painters, sculptors, and writers turned towards the biblical dancer with renewed interest, and transformed the girl whom the Bible described as a mere instrument of Herodias’s wrath into an active agent of female desire, casting her as the prototype of the ‘femme fatale’.

Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, first performed in Paris in 1896, was one of the key works that established Salome’s fame as cultural icon of fin-de-siècle Europe. In Wilde’s drama, Herodias and her vengeance retreat to the background of the story, while Salome’s twisted desire for the prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist) comes to the fore. Aware of her own sensuality and sexual power, she is driven by her obsession to kiss the prophet, which in the end, will cause not only his, but also her own demise.

Wilde’s drama was particularly enthusiastically received in Russia, where his femme fatale underwent yet another transformation in the context of the emerging Soviet state. Here, she was re-interpreted as an androgynous and Amazon-like character, and transformed into an emblem not only for a new artistic avant-garde indebted to Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, but also for a new, energetic, and determined woman born out of the Revolution.

Aleksandra Ekster’s designs for Aleksandr Tairov’s 1917 production of Wilde’s Salome at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow are perhaps the most radical embodiments of these ideas. In her costume design for Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils, shown here, Ekster strips the dancer of all connotations of sensuality and eroticism. Instead, Salome’s passions and destructive desires are transformed into an energetic kaleidoscope of movement and colour, her body merging with the stage behind.

References

Misler, Nicoletta. 2011. ‘Seven Steps, Seven Veils: Salomé in Russia’, Experiment, 17: 155–84